He had just published a book soberly entitled “Techno-feudalism – critique of the digital economy”.
What I immediately liked was first of all the attempt to qualify the economy in the digital age, to theorize it, I found that daring and salutary. And then, I really liked the term coined by Cédric Durand: “techno-feudalism”, the antinomy between “techno” on the one hand, which refers to ultra-modernity, even to the future, with its billionaires in hoodies and its all-windowed head offices and “feudalism”, on the other, which refers to Europe in the Middle Ages with its fortified castles, its lords, its vassals and its serfs. If I’m completely honest, what I liked about this idea of techno-feudalism was a little bit of The Visitors Land in Silicon Valley.
But Cédric Durand is a serious economist and his point was supported: he showed how these two terms “technology” and “feudalism” were not contradictory, but went very well together. It showed how the economic system being put in place around the digital giants strangely resembled that which had dominated in Europe until the French Revolution, with mechanisms of rent, unpaid work, privatization of public spaces. etc.
I regret not having discussed it with Cédric at that time. But his book came out in 2020, we were still in the pandemic, we were probably thinking of something else.
But the beautiful thing about ideas is that, when they are good, they circulate. And indeed, “techno-feudalism” has just resurfaced under the pen of another economist, Greek this time, Yanis Varoufakis.
Yanis Varoufakis, we know him above all because he was the flamboyant finance minister in the government of Alexi Tsipras during the terrible crisis which pitted Greece against the European Union in the early 2010s. We remember the extremely tough negotiations that the Greeks were leading, with Germany in particular, and we come to Yanis Varoufakis, a tall guy with an almost shaved head, an angular face, a hard look, who tried to oppose a left-wing economic vision to a European Union which wanted make the Greek population pay for the mistakes of their successive governments.
Today, Varoufakis has once again become the economist he always was, and here he is publishing a book “The New Serfs of the Economy” where he takes up the notion of “techno-feudalism” coined by Cédric Durand. He takes it back and cooks it in his own sauce, with his obsessions – like criticism of the European Union. And it’s not uninteresting…
So with my colleague from Nouvel Obs Pascal Riché, who is hitting his mark in economics, we went to interview Yanis Varoufakis. He arrived even more chic than during his ministerial period, both friendly and authoritarian. And we started from the beginning, to fully understand what it was all about.
